There’s a reason Look Mum No Computer might appear a little strange. It’s because absolutely every single thing about it is completely and utterly bonkers. But importantly, it’s also rather brilliant. This eccentric game brings in elements of Vampire Survivors, bullet hell twin-stick shooters, and traditional RPGs, all while telling the story of an electronics repairman and his sentient synthesizer backpack who can shrink to the size of specks of dust. Oh, and it’s also about using music as weapons. Incredibly strange.

Sam is your typical electronics dude. He’s quiet, lives surrounded by a billion circuit boards and bits of musical equipment, and enjoys building musical machines out of random parts. Also, he’s just made a sentient modular synthesizer called Kosmo, a chatterbox who can shrink the pair to explore the circuitry of faulty electronic appliances. Based on the modules currently inserted into Kosmo’s spare slots, you gain a range of different passive and active attacks and abilities, which are used to complete quests for the denizens of each broken item, battle errant creatures (living dust, conscious coins—that sort of thing), and play a unique soundtrack as you go.

This is all genuinely true. And honestly, just a fraction of how deeply weird this excellent game really is. Because for all this context, none of it does justice to just how it all looks too. The scratchy pixel graphics and CRT filters speak to early ‘90s home computer gaming, but the deranged nature of the art speaks to an unhinged mind. Then you have the storylines found in each appliance, all utterly loopy. An old cash register, for instance, has become split into two castes—the super-rich bank notes and the poor, lowly coins—and you must bring them together to battle against a giant blockage that’s preventing any money from coming in or going out. Or there’s the vacuum cleaner populated by friendly dust bunnies (which are actual bunnies) and clogged up by evil dust monsters who’ve created no-go areas and must be destroyed.

How the synthesizer elements fit into all of this is even more peculiar. Kosmo can be upgraded at a shop in the town of Soldersworth, where all your clients live. New slots for passive and active abilities can be opened, and new components can be unlocked, constructed, and upgraded. Each gives you an attack or a defensive move to use in the twin-stick shooting portions, letting you cycle through an ever-growing range of weapons and buffs to develop a playstyle that suits you. However, the upgrading all takes the form of switches and elements on the modules that change the soundtrack as you play, and honestly, this aspect is fairly bewildering. What you need to know is that you also have a limited supply of energy to allocate across all your modules. That pool is also upgradable, so you need to balance how powerful each tool is accordingly.

But more importantly, you also get to tear through room after room in each of the many faulty pieces of electronic equipment, each with completely unique enemies and missions, dodging enemy attacks while juggling through the cooldowns of each of your weapons. And it’s tremendously fun to do so. The game feels so constantly fresh because every item you’re fixing is an entirely different playing field. Fix a computer in a junkyard, and you’re inside WinDoors 94 helping out various file types. Someone’s installed a bootleg version of a game about “plumbers and monkeys,” and now there’s a virus in the system. You’ll not be too surprised to learn that you’re battling literal bugs. Or lend a hand to the local arcade with their broken pinball machine, and it’s onto a world of bouncy bumpers, errant springs, and a society of pinballs to help out.

The further you progress, the more weapons you can have installed. Each has a meter that quickly overheats, but then it automatically switches to the next one on your synth board as the previous one enters its cooldown phase. How you jump between your bouncing pellets, laser beam, or chain-lightning attacks (to name just a few) affects how you respond to each unique enemy’s attack abilities and patterns, especially when it comes to approaching the boss fights.

However, despite all this complexity, I’m delighted to say it’s not a difficult game. It’s challenging, certainly, but this isn’t a roguelite, and it doesn’t want to endlessly kill you. It’s a game about progression, and as such, death comes with the very minimal penalty of respawning at your last teleport point. Reentering any area in any level automatically refills it with its original contingent of enemies (with the exception of challenge rooms, which are packed with creatures to fight but remain empty once they're defeated), so you will need to re-battle (or run right past) everything you previously beat. 

Refilling rooms is ideal, though, since all enemies drop electronic components used for building new or upgraded modules, so you’re constantly seeking loot to hoover up. Meanwhile, completing quests for the characters in each appliance will earn you new schematics for building more modules, paid for with Artefacts—little green creatures you find hidden in many areas that, for some reason, the guy at the local shop accepts as payment.

So yes, it’s complete mayhem, but my goodness, it works. You can tackle fixing any of the different appliances any time you like, and leave them whenever you want to jump into another. Some will contain challenges you might not be able to do right away, like tough fights with strict time limits or competitive races against daft characters you meet, so you’ll want to return to clear those once you’ve got a more powerful arsenal of abilities. But it’s also fun to just jump out of one and start another for the sheer variety.

Despite the British vibes and humor (which you might have guessed from the “mum,” not “mom,” in the title) this is a German game, and it’s fair to say the outright peculiarity of it all is likely unique to creator The Bitfather. It’s a superb game, absolutely absorbing, wildly weird, and almost certainly unlike anything else you’ll have played. You can check out Look Mum No Computer on the Epic Games Store now.